Most economists believe that international trade provides economic benefits to both the exporting and importing countries. A large literature characterizes and estimates the welfare gains from trade, and identifies the mechanisms through which trade affects workers, firms and the aggregate economy. Some policymakers believe that international trade has effects beyond changing economic outcomes such as prices, expenditures, wages, employment and productivity. Trade may change individuals’ views and attitudes towards other countries and cultures. For example, individuals who have directly benefited from international trade by selling their production abroad may hold more cosmopolitan views and be more favorable towards the values of their buyers.

Of course, participation in international trade and an individual’s views and attitudes may simply be correlated. It is hard to estimate the causal impact of trade on views and attitudes because of the difficulty of finding a convincing counterfactual since substantial evidence suggests that exporters differ from non-exporters. It is also difficult to estimate this relationship because one needs to complement trade data with surveys on individual attitudes.

We hope to make progress on these issues and provide the first rigorous evidence on how exposure to trade with Western Democracies affects participants’ views and attitudes. We do this by utilizing the randomized allocation of export orders to rug-making firms in Fowa, Egypt, as described in Atkin, Khandelwal and Osman (forthcoming). More than five years after the initial randomization, and three years after our last follow up survey, we re-surveyed producers to collect information on their attitudes and world views. We developed a survey that focused on issues of economic equality, gender equality, information sources and international trade. Most importantly, given the geographic and historical context of our sample, we also asked questions about Western bias and attitudes towards terrorism. Our main hypothesis is that trade with Western democracies decreases anti-Western bias and support for terrorism.

This is a new survey implemented on the participants of an early randomized experiment, registered as AEARCTR-0000069. In that experiment we provided a subset of handmade rug manufacturing firms the opportunity to work on orders place by foreign buyers.

Intervention Start Date

2010-06-01

Intervention End Date

2017-04-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

Attitudes towards foreign countries and views on terrorism.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design

The experiment is outlined in Atkin, Khandelwal and Osman (QJE, forthcoming). We provided a subset of handmade rug manufacturing firms the opportunity to work on orders place by foreign buyers.

Experimental Design Details

Randomization Method

Randomization done in office by a computer.

Randomization Unit

Randomized at the firm level.

Was the treatment clustered?

No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

219 individual firms

Sample size: planned number of observations

219 individual firms

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

79 treatment firms, 140 control firms.

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)